In recent years, the number of users on the internet has increased exponentially. With this increase in popularity, there has also come an increased demand for tools which enhance the “on line experience.” To this end, new object oriented computer programming languages such as Java™ have been developed. While these languages are an advance over prior technology, there is still room for improvement, particularly in the ability to efficiently modify layout of complex structures of graphical objects in variable sized windows. It is difficult to implement high quality, real time graphics on a web site using these languages.
Java allows minimum and maximum sizes to be specified for graphical objects and uses those values in a way that causes objects to act more stretchy when the differences between their minimum and maximum sizes is large.
A language explicitly developed for internet applications is the MIT Curl Language by M. Hostetter et al, “Curl: A Gentle Slope Language for the Web,” WorldWideWeb Journal, Vol II. Issue 2, O'Reilly & Associates, Spring 1997. Embodiments of the present invention extend the Curl language. (The language of this embodiment of the present invention will be referenced as “Curl” and is to be distinguished from the prior “MIT Curl” language.) MIT Curl used a three-pass layout negotiation scheme and allowed objects to describe their size preferences in terms of a minimum size and a stretchiness coefficient.
TeX is a widely used text formatting program developed by Donald Knuth. Donald E. Knuth, The TeXBook, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1984. TeX uses a concept known as “glue” to express dimensional preferences of fill objects and incorporates different stretch and compression orders that can be used to describe the stretchiness and compressibility of different kinds of fill objects. As the overall dimensions of a layout change, the dimensions of individual fill objects change dependent on preferred sizes and stretchiness of those objects.
A graphics tool kit developed by Robert Halstead called Stk incorporates the concept of an elastic, known as “glue,” having a minimum size, a stretchiness coefficient and a stretch order associated with graphical objects having content. The tool kit formalizes the layout computations of horizontal and vertical boxes of graphical objects in terms of elastic add, max and divide operations. Stk is not widely known or used. The layout mechanism of Stk was incorporated into Swat, a graphics toolkit developed at MIT by Harold Abelson, James Miller and Natalya Cohen.